1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a bill handling machine that receives and dispenses bills or bank notes, and to a method of recovering bills stored in a bill handling machine.
2. Description of the Related Art
An automated teller machine (hereinafter ATM) used by users to deposit or withdraw money at a financial institution or the like incorporates a bill handling machine for receiving and dispensing bills. Bill handling machines include so-called recycling types, in which received bills are reused by being dispensed in other transactions. A bill handling machine of recycling type receives and dispenses bills by means of the following operations.
When receiving bills, the bill handling machine discriminates the denomination and authenticity of bills fed in from a cash slot, and calculates the deposited amount. Bills determined to be genuine are held in a temporary stocker, while other bills are returned to the cash slot. This operation will be referred to as “cash count.” When the user subsequent confirms the deposited amount, the bill handling machine now places the bills, which had been held in the temporary stocker, into a holding box for recycling (hereinafter referred to as a “recycle box”) provided for each denomination. In conjunction with this operation, the ATM notifies a host computer of the deposit amount, account information and the like. This operation will be referred to as “deposit storage” or “store money.” During a withdrawal, bills corresponding to an indicated amount are fed to a cash-out slot from recycle boxes for the appropriate denominations.
Some bills supplied to a bill handling machine are not suitable for being recycled. Such bills would include, for example, severely damaged genuine notes, counterfeit notes, uncertain notes (unidentified notes) deemed to have uncertain authenticity during validation, and the like. When such a bill is discovered during cash count operation, the bill is returned to the cash slot. When such a bill is discovered during store money operation, the bill is recovered to a recovery box termed a “reject box,” provided separately from the recycle boxes. Bills in the reject box are not recycled for subsequent use. The design and operation of a recycling type bill handling machine of the type described above is disclosed, for example, in JP2003-51050A.
Of bills stored in the reject box, uncertain notes are reexamined and subjected to more careful discrimination of authenticity at the financial institution. Since rejected bills stored in the reject box may include a combination of damaged bills (which, though damaged, are genuine), counterfeit bills, uncertain notes, all bills including damaged bills are reexamined leading to waste in the process.
To address this problem, it would be possible to employ a method whereby there is provided a dedicated storing box, separate from the reject box, for storing only those bills referred to as uncertain notes on the basis of the validation result during deposit. However, this poses the risk other problems, namely of larger size of the bill handling machine due to the additional storing box, or of an insufficient number of storage boxes within the bill handling machine due to assignment of existing storage boxes to dedicated use for uncertain notes.
Such problems are not limited to recycling type bill handling machines, but are common to non-recycling type bill handling machines, referred as cash dispensers (hereinafter CD machines). Furthermore, such problems are not limited to cases where uncertain notes are sorted out and recovered, but are common also to cases where bills of certain denomination are sorted out and recovered, or where damaged bills only are sorted out and recovered.